Specifications of alarms and alarm handling mechanisms in surveillance systems tend to be different for each surveillance application. However, user requirements have tendency to keep changing. Therefore, it is difficult to predefine and develop a system to support all surveillance applications. Moreover, each surveillance system has its own format of alarms and actions that are not interoperable with other surveillance systems. In enterprise or wide area sensor network surveillance environments where surveillance systems from many vendors are installed, demands to uniformly and efficiently manage alarms and actions increase. Thus, there is a need for a way to ease dynamic alarm definition and development, and to uniformly and efficiently manage alarms and actions, especially in enterprise and wide area sensor network surveillance environments. The present invention fulfills this need.